Like Netflix, change has changed since 97. It’s time to disrupt change management!

MIT Sloan recently reported that “companies are unprepared for the disruptions projected to occur in their industry due to digital trends […] largely due to internal obstacles”.

Fundamental issue: change has changed…. but HR continues to rely on change management approaches from the late 90’s / early 00’s. Back then, the pace of change was relatively controlled; the dust had time to settle before the next big change. That era is gone FOREVER. In our increasingly digital world, change is fast-pace, constant, disruptive and overlapping.

Netflix provides a good analogy to illustrate how much change has changed. When Netflix was launched in ’97, it caused major disruptions to the movie rental business. Yet, if we could order a movie online, we still had to wait for the DVD to arrive via mail. Fast forward 20 years: once we order a movie on Netflix, bang, it starts streaming instantly. The pace of change has accelerated as much as Netflix’s delivery model.

I will highlight three critical thrusts to disrupt change management:

Move away from HR’s beloved centre-of-excellence model (change is a game of proximity).

ORCHANGO [awr-cheyn-goh] is a Canadian-based management consulting and learning agency established in 2002. Our specialty is change management when change is fast-paced, ongoing and disruptive — in other words, today’s change. We build the change capabilities of public and private sector clients while helping them win in an increasingly digital world.